The Tin Drum Book 1, "Rasputin and the Alphabet" (1959), as translated by Ralph Manheim (1961)

I shall speak of … how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another … Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next … Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis and progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.

"On Stasis and Progress"' in Diary of a Snail (1972)

We of the long tails! We of the presentient whiskers! We of the perpetually growing teeth! We, the serried footnotes to man, his proliferating commentary. We, indestructible!